Any Biin Computers out there??

From: Innfogra_at_aol.com <(Innfogra_at_aol.com)>
Date: Fri Dec 25 02:55:40 1998

The Biin Computer was a joint project of Intel and Siemens to manufacture a
fault tolerant computer for Online Transaction Processing about 1989. It used
multiple custom processors i860 or i960 based, I'm not sure which. Memory was
32 or 64 Meg from the factory. It's operating system resided on a 5 1/4 FH 300
Meg Siemens HD. Data resided on one or more IPI interfaced 9" 800 Meg HDs. VME
Bus, SCSI peripherals. Unix based I think.

The story was to build 100 prototypes, put them out for testing and see where
it went. Biin wanted to compete with IBM and Tandem. After several years,
problems with split management and, not the least, too small of hard drives
they had spent $5 million. When they were going to have to spend at least 3
times that to ramp up production they pulled the plug, called in the machines
and liquidated the company. I suspect they couldn't generate sales.

Biin scrapped the machines. We bought and sold the IPI drives, memory 1300
DC600 tapes and much of the new part inventory. Under a certified destruction
contract we scrapped the remaining chassis. These were very interesting, about
20 "W X 30"H X 36"D. NEW! They had been shipped Air freight from Germany.
Fully assembled, ready to have drives and cards installed. Very well made, It
took a skilled person 4 hours to disassemble one to component parts. I hated
doing it, they were extremely nice machines, great German workmanship.

I was wondering if any of the machines might have escaped from Biin's grip?
Maybe in Germany?

Culled from the 1300 tapes is a complete factory set of Biin Software. If
there were a machine around it might be useful to keep.

Much later I was able to obtain the pinboard tester for the main CPU card. It
came with a prototype card, test manual and SW for the tester.

Anyway I was wondering if anyone has seen, used or has one of these computers?
The Biin is definitely rare and about 10 yrs old. If any exist it would be
collectable.
Received on Fri Dec 25 1998 - 02:55:40 GMT